Celia has started to imitate some of the things we do. She already claps and waves, but now she’s moving her hands like she’s washing them right after I wash mine (about 8 billion and 2 times a day thanks to eating, toileting, cleaning and laundry).

Also this week, while I did my best job trying to imitate a good parent while not further injuring my back by laying on the floor and playing with the girls, Celia learned how to give me raspberries on my belly. I’ve been doing them to her for a while now, but she is super drooly these days and I ended up a slobbery laughing mess.

Today my parents cat Ginny passed sadly. She was young, the litter mate of my Fred and George, my last family of foster cats. My parents graciously took her from me when I had too many cats after she had been returned from her first home. She was named ‘ghost cat’ for a long while as she didn’t show up much. But she eventually got comfortable in her new home and was very happy. The vet could best guess that she had some kind of infection which caused kidney failure, very fast.

It’s hard to figure out how to explain it to Josie, she does not understand the concept that our bodies don’t last forever. She asked where Ginny would go now that she’s not at Pama’s house. We said we didn’t know, she guessed Florida. She tried her best to come up with a solution (couldn’t the mailman bring medicine? why don’t the doctors give her any?) to the intolerable situation. Hopefully for Josie, the memory and the sadness will just fade, and for the rest of us we get to keep our happy memories of a very skittish but loving cat.

Who knew Kaya likes broccoli? not us.

Today’s assignment was to take a picture of how things are when they’re gone. I wanted to capture how things are at night around here when all is calm, the floor is cleaned up, and the cats come out to play. In this case, Jordi came out to play too with his video games. I played some more with lighting and my very compliant subject Ezzy. These rooms are very dark. I had the lights down very low as they normally at night are because I’m still enjoying nursing Celia before bed on the couch and getting some TV time in for myself.

Ezzy sat still for these 6-13 second long exposures (using the remote trigger). Despite us calling her over to visit for some of them. Then we threw her a toy and got some more interest.

Then Jordi came over for some playtime of his own.

Every morning, our old house with our old windows has condensation on the inside. Ezzy and others look forward to it each day and she licks it off in a new pattern.

After the storm on Wednesday, the snow pile is now above the bottom of the window. It’s very sad we have a snowthrower that needs a tune up in the garage.

This is supposed to capture just how they look, good, bad or whatever.

This is how I feel I spent a lot of my day, looking at the back of Josie’s head while she’s running off to do something and oh yeah Celia’s there too.

In an effort to get myself to pick up the camera some more and play with it with the girls I joined a project called Joy of Love. It’s basically a bit of photography class combined with a bit of inspiration for what to guide your photos. You’re supposed to focus on something you love, and you can shift each day, but I’m mostly going to focus on Josie. Things have been challenging for all of us with this 2.75 year old and so I want to highlight some positives and make sure to take time for some attention on her, and maybe even make her comfortable enough not to look away from the camera.

Day 1: What they do

So perhaps the rules are one photo picked per day, but this isn’t school, who needs rules.

This is Josie playing with some toys on the couch. It’s a little overexposed unfortunately but I think it just shows her gorgeous hair and pink lips.

Josie really likes to play with lots of little things lately, putting them in bags, lining them up, stacking them, carrying them around and distributing them. Here she lines up the numbers from her clock plus some lacing animals and a coin from her cash register for Mio. The light these days is super super harsh inside because of all the snow so I had to play with the exposure a bunch of times just to get the shapes to remotely show up. This scene ended with Mio swatting at Josie when she tried to move a piece that was near him, her crying briefly and him running away. Oh well.

Fred has once again rediscovered his love of our bouncey seat for the girls.

Somehow Fred and George have a rough relationship with yoga balls and seem to make us go through them at a rather unreasonable rate. The first one deflated when George fell off of the treadmill and onto the ball, claws out. They watched it deflate with amusement. Then we got a new one and one of them just literally walked up to it and stuck a claw into it and watched it deflate again. Ball #3 has been around for a while now, until Josie tried to pull a blanket out from under Fred who then fell over onto the ball next to the couch. Ball #4 is de-smelling in the basement because they sure are handy tools for bouncing the baby and stretching our backs.